1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of molecular biology and oncology. More particularly, it concerns methods for identifying and treating cancers that have one copy of an essential gene functionally inactivated (e.g., by deletion or mutation of all or part of the gene coding sequence, epigenetic silencing of a locus, among other mechanisms).
2. Description of Related Art
Successful treatment of cancer has remained elusive despite rapid advances in the field in recent years. One major complicating factor in effective treatment is that conventional diagnostic analyses for tumor characterization (e.g., by pathological examination) offer limited guidance as to what types of anti-cancer therapy may be successful for treating any given cancer. In fact, cancer cells exhibit a wide range of resistance/susceptibility to various anti-cancer therapies, thus it has been difficult to predict whether a particular cancer will be resistant or susceptible to a given therapy. To address this issue genetic analysis of tumor cells has recently been be used to further characterize the specific cancer cells in patients. However, the results of such analyses typically show a plethora of genetic changes in the cancer and often do not provide a useful guide for therapeutic intervention. For example, heterozygous deletion of large regions of the genome is a prototypic somatic event in cancer. In many cases, the genetic instability exhibited by cancer cells drives tumor genesis by ablating the function of critical tumor suppressor genes. However, deletions are often large and can encompass neighboring genes with no known role in cancer pathogenesis. To date there has been no guidance as to how such mutations in tumor cells could be harnessed to improve cancer diagnosis or therapy.